Why we Fear Failure

Failure, especially failure in the creative industry, has really caught my attention recently. There is such a stigma around creative individuals, and I'm not just talking about writers. Whether you're a musician, artist, dancer, actor, etc., we are always told that we cannot make a living off of doing what we love. We're taught, and I believe that this often starts in school, that a career in these industries cannot support us financially nor is it good for our health and overall wellness.

While I think this stigma is still strong, I do believe it's changing, and it's defiantly more acceptable for someone to be a writer today than it was twenty years ago.

This conversation on failure stemmed from a few sources—A book I'm reading called—Real Artists Don't Starve by Jeff Goins, the writing workshop I'm creating, and the people I talk to and meet on instagram on a daily basis.

Some of you know this story, but in March I stopped working on my first novel, Gray Slave, that I'd been working on since 2017. I was working on this book for two years, and I thought it was almost done. Then I had some people beta read it, and realized there was still a lot of work to be done.

At the time, this absolutely crushed me. I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to set the book aside, but I also didn't want to write and try to fix it in the mind set I was in because I had no idea where to start.

It's now November, and in that time since putting my novel aside, I've grown so much more than I ever could have imagined.

The funny thing was even after I stopped writing Gray Slave, I was still afraid. I felt like I failed. I felt embarrassed and completely incapable. I didn't even want to think about the book. But that was the best thing that could have happened for my writing career, and if I could go back, I wouldn't have had it any other way.

If you're learning any new skill, you're going to fail—when you learned to walk, you fell a lot. That's failing to walk. When you learned to ride a bike, you fell. That's failing. When you try to play a sport or perform and mess up, that's failing.

These are small failures, but failures none the less. Everything we've ever tried in our lives, we've started out being bad at, so why is writing any different? Why does failing to write a best-seller when we've never put a pen to paper make us feel incompetent? Why are we even trying to write best-sellers!?

How is failing to get a chapter written or an agent or publisher any different than the failures you've gone through before? How is it any different than the struggles you've overcome? You've gone through some hard times, and that's normal, but are you really going to let the fear of failure stop you when you've been at war with it your entire life? Are you really going to let it hold you back from writing the book you want to write?

I hope the answer is no, but if the answer is yes, if you're saying—"Failure is what's holding me back right now. I've failed before and it was humiliating and I promised myself I'd never try writing again," then take a step back.

Everyday we look around and we see failure—we see it in companies who are losing money. Maybe we see it in our own businesses and families, or in our friend groups and the people around us. I don't know what that failure looks like for you, or maybe you're going through a great time in your life right now that calls for celebration. But the thing about failure, is that it hits us when we don't expect it to, it hit me when writing Gray Slave, and since we have no control over our writing, over our lives, over the outcome. We live in fear.

It's easy to say that you aren't going to be afraid of something. It's easy to say you're going to do something. It's a lot harder to actually do it.

I think in this day and age people are more scared of failure then every before for a few reasons—they have unbelievably high expectations for themselves. They are scared of what other people will think, especially the response they will get from social media. And they were told sometime in their youth that they weren't good enough, and that experience of them, "not being good enough," was their first experience of failing for someone else.

When you don't meet your goals, that's stinks. But when you don't meet the needs you're supposed to provide or that our expected of you by someone else, especially if that person is someone you care about, that's a whole different level of failure.

That's the failure that crushes people. That's the kind that crushes dreams and turns lives upside down.

I genuinely believe that when we care for someone there's a part of us that will always care about them. I think we focus on all of the bad things in the world and all of the bad people instead of the good that is going on right in front of our eyes.

Maybe that's just my optimism, but I don't think you can make it through life with a negative outlook because if you try to find the bad in everything, you'll miss the good and you'll never be happy. This is the outlook you have to have when it comes to failure and success.

Yes, you will fail, but you have to cherish your successes, no matter how small, and you have to let those successes push you through the times of failures.

This blog post got me thinking even more about failure. I don't think I could ever fully understand it. I don't think there's some secret formula that guarantees success. I think how much you fear failures differs from how much I fear it, and how much your neighbor fears it, and I think that's due to our different experiences and backgrounds and how we are blatantly just different people.

Fear is connected to every part of our being. It influences our emotions, our psychology and behaviors, our physical bodies, and our spirits.

The truth is that we will always be scared of something, but let's not fear failure. Because at the end of the day, what is failure? Failure is when you don't achieve something, and by not writing your book, you have a zero percent chance of success.

Failure is in every aspect of our lives, but we need to remember our past failures and look at them and how they've shaped us into the people we are today. We need to remember the struggles we've gone through and say to ourselves, "Hey, I went through this, and I made it. I'll make it through this current struggle too."

We need to remember all of the people who are cheering us on, instead of focusing on the ones who are tearing us down. We need to thank God for giving us the lives we've been given and the opportunity to inspire others through our writing, and we need to remember He is with us through all of this craziness.

Everyone goes through a state of failure—a time in their life where they aren't doing so great, and we need to realize that this is normal. Failing is normal.

Don't be scared to write that book, but remember every writer before you was afraid. They found success and conquered their fears and so can you. You do that by taking the first step— whether that's coming up with an idea for a book, or outlining your novel, or writing the first draft. Take that first step. Make goals to hold yourself accountable and to stay on course, and when you fail, because you will feel like a failure at one point or another, look at how far you've come and how much farther you will go.

Thanks for reading this blog post. I hope it inspired you and made you feel empowered to go write your story. Someone out there needs to hear your words. No one else can write them like you can. Happy writing!

It's been a pleasure writing for you, and until next time—stay weird and stay writing. - Lexi

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